The Internet is growing in popularity, and more and more people are conducting business over the Internet, advertising their products and services by generating and sending electronic mass mailings. This electronic mail (e-mail) is usually unsolicited and regarded as nuisances by the recipients because they occupy much of the storage space needed for the necessary and important data processing.
For example, a mail server may have to reject accepting an important and/or desired e-mail when its storage capacity is filled to the maximum with the unwanted e-mail containing advertisements. Moreover, thin client systems such as set top boxes, PDA's, network computers, and pagers all have limited storage capacity. Unwanted mail in any one of such systems can tie up a finite resource for the user. In addition, a typical user wastes time by downloading voluminous but useless advertisement information. Unwanted mail typically slows down users by forcing the mail to be downloaded when the mail is delivered. Because this type of mail is so undesirable, it has acquired a special name in the Internet community, spam.
Prior art FIG. 1 illustrates a prior art anti-spam system 10 capable of filtering spam, in accordance with the prior art. As shown, a computer 16 is equipped with two separate applications, an e-mail manager 14 and an anti-spam application 12. Such e-mail manager 14 may include Microsoft® Outlook®, Outlook Express®, or any other desired product. In use, such e-mail manager 14 is adapted to query an Internet Service Provider (ISP) 20 via a network for downloading electronic mail messages.
Working in parallel with the e-mail manager 14 is the anti-spam application 12, which also queries the ISP 20. In use, the anti-spam application 12 is capable of filtering the electronic mail messages downloaded by the e-mail manager 14.
As shown, the anti-spam application 12 works in parallel with the e-mail manager 14. In other words, the anti-spam application 12 queries the ISP 20 at periodic intervals for filtering purposes independently with respect to the queries of the e-mail manager 14. Ideally, the anti-spam application 12 performs its duties prior to the electronic mail messages being downloaded by the e-mail manager 14.
Unfortunately, however, due to the inherent deficiencies with the foregoing architecture, the e-mail manager 14, at the control of the user, may download electronic mail messages from the ISP 20 before the anti-spam application 12 performs the filtering operation, thus resulting in the display of a spam message to the user. These and other deficiencies associated with the above “competing access” architecture are indicative of a need for a more effective anti-spam system architecture and associated method.